Terumi Mei's tears seemed to flow down subconsciously, even though she didn't want to let herself cry, but the tears didn't listen to her at all. She wanted to wake the person in front of her again and again, and kept calling Yamada's name, but he never responded. In her disbelief in reality, she had even overlooked the most basic facts, how could a person whose internal organs had been emptied wake up again?
This was an impossible thing… and Terumi Mei also slowly understood it and stayed there sitting on the ground.
The sky, did not know when, began to rain.
The cold touch of water droplets made Terumi Mei wake up from her daze, and the feeling of sadness also gradually hit her. Satoru just felt her memory of that incident, and felt that this feeling made him a little out of breath.
It was also because of the rain that reminded Satoru that if he didn't take a quick look, the clues for which he had come here with great difficulty to find would disappear.
Satoru looked around and refused to let go of any detail, including the vegetation next to the corpse, the path he walked when he came, and even the stones next to him.
The terrain there was actually very open, with only some relatively small bushes. If someone wants to disembowel someone, it was not something that could be done in an instant. Since it was not done in an instant, it was bound to be at a risk of being discovered.
Below was the beach where many people come to fish. If Yamada were to be disemboweled here, someone would have definitely seen it, but why did the perpetrator choose this place?
Thinking of this, Satoru realized that there seemed to be no redundant traces of blood around there, 'He was just thrown here like a broken rag doll, in fact, he didn't die here, nor did his internal organs be pulled out here.'
Disposing the body.
This was the problem of every criminal, because only the footsteps of coming and going could be enough clues to give a lead.
So Satoru no longer tried to search for any signs of struggle there, but turned to look at the bushes next to their target, wondering if there would be anything left by the murderer.
Suddenly, a small, black piece of fabric caught Satoru's attention.
'What kind of pattern does it seem to have on it?'
Satoru wanted to see but he couldn't because he was not in the past, but rather it's just Terumi Mei's memory, so he couldn't do anything excessive, he could only see the world that Terumi Mei saw.
A feeling of dizziness suddenly hit him, and before he could react, the spiritual world made by Satoru's jutsu in Terumi Mei's shattered.
He opened his eyes suddenly, panting heavily, the overwhelming sense of sadness that just came from Terumi Mei seemed to have cleared at that moment.
'It has been so long, but her guilt is still the same as before.'
It was enough to see what kind of guilt Terumi Mei had lived with all these years.
Satoru noticed that when Yamada disappeared, there were other people who wanted to follow Terumi Mei to find him, but Terumi Mei didn't want to trouble others, so she declined.
Terumi Mei might have been thinking for so many years that if she hadn't rejected those people at that time, maybe she could have found Yamada earlier, and maybe Yamada wouldn't have died.
These were just speculations, but it was precisely these speculations that have tortured Terumi Mei for a long time. She has no way to get rid of them by herself, and she couldn't find a satisfactory answer, so she wandered about the answer in pain again and again, torturing herself.
Just like a cold machine, she dedicated herself to be a qualified Mizukage in the eyes of outsiders, so as to temporarily forget the guilt about Yamada in her heart.
However, even so, not much had changed for her.
Satoru, who had experienced the pain himself, felt that if he doesn't help Terumi Mei, she might visit Yamada herself after a while.
'The murderer must be found quickly…'
The clues seen in the memory just now were very limited, and Satoru must sort them out in the shortest possible time.
What attracted Satoru's attention the most was the cloth fragment in the grass.
If you someone was carrying a corpse without any sealing scroll or had blood on him/her, he/she have to go through those bushes. If not paid enough attention at the time, his/her clothes might get torn, but the murderer didn't notice these details when he/she walked away, so they were left behind as clues.
But just a glimpse from a distance was too limited to be a solid clue.
Satoru closed his eyes and carefully recalled the characteristics of that piece of fabric.
There seemed to be a red pattern on the black fabric. Although it was just a little piece, it felt inexplicably familiar.
'It's as if I've seen it somewhere.'
'Red stripes on black background…'
Although he didn't know what the shape of the complete pattern was, the particular color scheme alone reminded Satoru of an organization.
Akatsuki.
The members of the Akatsuki organization were also clothed with red cloud pattern on a black background, and everyone was dressed the same uniform.
But when Yamada died, it was more than ten years ago. At that time, the people in the Akatsuki organization should not have done anything on a large scale. So who did it?
"Uhh…"
Terumi Mei seemed to be waking up.
She rubbed her eyes and looked around, and finally fixed her eyes on Satoru.
"I felt you, I felt that you seem to have entered my memory… So did you find anything?"
Satoru didn't know how to tell about the minimum clues he had just found. If he said something, it might give Terumi Mei hope, but if he said something wrong now, then this hope would become a thorn in her heart.
Satoru didn't want to do this, so after thinking about it, he could only shake his head.
"You may have been too flustered at that time, so the details I could see were very limited, I could only see Yamada's body, but don't worry, I will try my best to sort out the pictures I just saw, in case I can find some clues."
Hearing this, Terumi Mei also bowed her head guiltily.
"Sorry, I really had no other choice at that time... I couldn't do anything. After I sent the body back to the village, I took people there to continue looking for clues, but I still found nothing."
"You mean, you took someone there later to find clues?"
"Yes."
Terumi Mei blinked and said, "I did look for clues later, but I didn't find a single clue. If you want to take a look, I can let you go to that memory even tens of time if that what it takes."
But Satoru hesitated.
"This will be very painful for you, are you sure you can bear it?"
*****
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